Listen to this episode here.
This is an intensely visual episode. If you'd like to follow along with the sheets we mention and get some extra commentary from me, you can do so at https://www.diceexploder.com/blog/2024/2/22/dice-exploder-aftershow-character-sheets
I’m fascinated by character sheets, mostly because there are so so so precious few that I think do a good job. I don’t mean this to call anyone out - I think the job of making a good character sheet might genuinely be impossible. They just have so much they have to accomplish.
Today I'm talking to Emanoel Melo, designer of CBR+PNK, about what we like in character sheets and whether there are any we would actually go to bat for.
Further reading
Aftershow blog post featuring all the character sheets we talk about plus extra commentary on diceexploder.com
Bruno Prosaiko, the artist behind the beautiful ornate sheets we talk about, on Instagram
A collection of Brazilian tabletop games on itch that Emanoel curates
Socials
Emanoel on Twitter and Instagram. His website, Cabinet of Curiosities.
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and call Ikea's customer service hotline for help with assembly. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my co host this week is Emanoel Melo.
First star today. If you want even more from me talking about RPGs this week, I was a guest host on the RTFM podcast. We talked about Errant which I had quite a few thoughts on. RTFM, wherever podcasts are sold. Okay this week.
I think the job of making a good character sheet might genuinely be impossible. It has to accomplish so many things: be a quick reference document, but also contain every piece of information a player could conceivably want at the table, and also be visually compelling, convey the tone of the game, and ideally fit on a single sided US letter page while having font large enough that it's still legible. Ugh!
I wanted to talk to someone with solid visual design chops about all this, and I immediately thought of Emanuel Melo, the man behind Cabinet of Curiosities games and designer of CBP+PNK, or Cyber Plus Punk, a Cyberpunk one shot forged in the dark game about a bunch of people doing one last job TM. Emanuel managed to take essentially all the rules for Blades in the Dark and fit them on a trifold pamphlet. And then he and his publisher Mythworks printed them dry erase for clean reuse. Ugh, I love these things.
We kick off by talking about one of my favorite character sheets, from Mothership, the smash hit space survival horror game. We track its evolution from zero edition to first edition before broadening out into many other games.
Now, this is obviously an episode about an intensely visual subject matter, and honestly, I think about half of it is complete nonsense if you don't have the sheets we're talking about in front of you. So, I've also written a companion blog post where you can see all the sheets we talk about and more, along with some additional thoughts from me on all kinds of examples. Check the link in the show notes. That's also where you can, as always, find a transcript of the show if you prefer that way of following along asynchronously while you're looking at the sheets.
All right, here is Emanuel Malo with the Mothership character sheet.
Emanoela Manuel Mello, thanks for being here.
Emanoel: Thank you so much for having me.
Sam: So, what are we talking about today?
Emanoel: We are talking about character sheets in general but specifically about Mothership character sheets.
Sam: Have you played Mothership? I actually haven't, I've played like one session of Mothership, so I don't really know what
Emanoel: Same here, same here, yeah. I have have, the books, the, Zero Edition version of Dead Planet, and A Pound of Flesh, which is my favorite supplement and module and scenario for any RPG ever released that I never played. But, it is great, it is great. I wish I could have a GM just, I go through with that, play that thing, but, yeah.
Sam: Alright, well, Mothership it's like a sci fi horror game. It's very alien in aesthetic. It has this feel throughout it that you are, like, reading the technical manual for a, like, CRT monitor, like, a really old green computer. has that kind of old school but sci fi feeling to it. And it is very explicitly a horror game.
Not every module that has come out for it is a horror kind of thing, but many of them are. And this game is, is sort of the de facto sci fi OSR game.
Emanoel: Yeah, at least in the horror genre because of the huge amount of material that has been put out for it. It's amazing. Many of the scenarios are just like weird, weird things going on, not exactly horror, but just weird. And I love that.
Sam: So, let's get into the character sheet. Do you want to start with the 1e or the 0e?
Emanoel: I think the 0e is a good start because you can see that it's very much like we are still playtesting this thing, because the game was like being released as zine, just a very small brochure. You can see, like, some of this stuff is still to be polished in the following edition.
So, just to describe little bit, the character sheet is primarily on horizontal. It's like, most of the time I see it on landscape format, and basically divided into two columns. And you can see that the part where the character name and level and title is, is just like a small part on the upper part of the character sheet and the rest is just these connections going through like a circuit, like a
Sam: It's like a flowchart.
Emanoel: flowchart of information and dozens of arrows going, pointing out to whatever you need to complete your characters and also play the game. So it's very, really interesting. The first time I saw this my mind was blown because I've seen many complicated character sheets, of course, but this one looked like complicated, but you could follow the flow, not just because of the errors and numbers, but also the way it was designed to guide you through. It's very well thought.
Sam: I've never seen a character sheet that teaches you how to make a character on the sheet, and in retrospect, it's wild that not every character sheet does that. Like, of course a character sheet should do that. I guess that's not actually true, like the Apocalypse World character sheet, like a lot of PBTA character sheets do teach you how to fill it out.
But there's something special about the way this character sheet looks like a document that your character might actually be carrying around. Like, it it looks like a technical manual. There's like a notes column in it, and it has like a graph paper background to it, which gives that feeling of this being a piece of scratch paper or like a corporate form that you are filling out.
I think like a lot about how classic Dungeons and Dragons character sheets, and God forbid you get to something like Pathfinder, or like, you know, something like six pages long, or even worse. But like, filling out the character sheet kind of feels like filling out a tax return in the US at least. It just, it's just this, like, bureaucratic nightmare.
And Mothership understands that and like, helps you through the process with the flowcharts, but also like, that feels right for Mothership. Like, Mothership is a world in which you might have like, a bunch of paperwork laying around that you don't like and don't want to deal with, so it feels like, diegetic to the game.
Emanoel: Sure, yeah, because Mothership one of the things about this game is that you can, just like in Alien and perhaps The Abyss, you are a blue collar worker.
Sam: Yeah.
Emanoel: You are on a job, like, you are carrying cargo, you are just checking equipment, and, or, scavenging a delivery ship, and you work for a corporation. You have a sponsor. So, yeah, it fits very well the theme, and, it's also, like, a bit of corporate horror,
Sam: Yeah.
Emanoel: yeah, to me it looks like a cross of a job application form and an assembly instruction sheet.
Like, you are doing both. Like, you are, your character, you are assembling your character. But it's also their job application, their, what they do, it's all there. What they are capable of, why they are in that spaceship or planet, etc.
part of the, the thing about the game being an OSR, it's like one of the things about OSR is that the players are made to think how the characters solve the problems without necessarily looking through the character sheet. Just look into the circumstances and, and be being creative.
Sam: Yeah.
Emanoel: it and trying to solve the problem, not necessarily engaging with the character sheet or combat. So it has a lot of numbers, but also you can see that many of the things you just mark the dot there and just say I have this skill and all the bits about the percentage, because it's a D100 game, so all the things about the percentage are like divided in columns on the skill list, so the skills in that column is plus 10%, plus 15 percent and plus 20%, so you don't have to be looking at numbers every time, you just know that your character might be better at that or this.
So it is really cool what they did here as well. They could like make that shit like, filled with numbers and, like you said in Pathfinder, you can find that, but, but they didn't, they like, they tried to just put the numbers once, you know? I thank them for that.
Sam: Yeah,
Yeah. The other thing you said in there that was interesting to me is how Mothership, by virtue of being an OSR game, as you say, where you're more trying to think about your world and the circumstances rather than the numbers on your sheet, is that this sheet is not something that is designed for you to look to for solutions.
Like, you are supposed to be out there in the game thinking about solutions, and then when you are called to react to something, that's when you're going to the character sheet for information. Most of the time, anyway. And so, in a moment where like, tension is building, you get to like hold that tension while you are looking for the information on your sheet.
Whereas in a classic Powered by the Apocalypse game, they're just covered in moves, and if I want to figure out what I can do that's special, I'm like reading through paragraphs of text. And there's something nice about not thinking about the character sheet until I'm reacting.
Emanoel: Yeah, sure. At least in the 0 edition you just have the name of the skill, just a small list of the equipment you're carrying. And the descriptions are in the book, of course, but I don't think you need much more than that.
about the PBTA, since we're talking about character sheets, PBTA presented me with some very clever solutions about character creation during gameplay. Like you can learn the game while playing, it's very cool, but also, you said about the paragraphs of text on the moves, that's really cumbersome in some aspects, because you are not supposed to look at moves for solutions, but you can't help yourself. It's always there, you are always looking down, especially if you are coming from more traditional gaming. Like if you grew up playing D& D or similar games, you are always having these special abilities or these spells, and you are always looking to the descriptions. And
Sam: Yeah.
Emanoel: very hard to not do the same thing playing PBTA.
But here on Mothership they have very few information about what's special about your characters that your class can do. It's one line, two lines of information, and that's it.
Sam: Yeah.
Emanoel: rest is just, like, the dots and the numbers, and very clean. I think it's like a very, very wise solution, because being a OSR adjacent game, it would be much easier for them to just follow up on that tradition of having all the, the areas for you to fill up your, powers, etc, with your special abilities.
But here they didn't. And they, they put all the four classes on the same character sheet. Like, there is no separate character sheets for each class. That's really interesting, how they could just fit all four in one sheet.
Sam: Yeah.
And it's, the other thing I'd say about the zero sheet is that there's so much, like, white text on black background as a way of like, drawing emphasis, but they use that for like, every skill and for so many things that it becomes just a lot of ink. It's a lot of black on the page. And so my eye is kind of being drawn everywhere at once. But also like a, overall, I agree. It's a very good looking character sheet.
Do we want to talk a little about what changed from the 0 edition character sheet to the 1 edition?
Emanoel: So that's a, a really interesting thing, because I was doing some research for this, and one of the things that I found out was that, back in the 70s D& D didn't have character sheets ready for you to just photocopy it and start playing. You had to like, handwrite everything, or buy the character sheets zines or magazines. And Games Workshop released the character sheet for Dungeons and Dragons and TSR was, wait, they're selling car sheets from our game. We need to do that. We need to do that as well.
But by then some, home brew car sheets were available and they had some interesting tweets on the examples found in the book. And TSR ended up incorporating some of that into their, next generation character sheets.
So I think, something like that happened here on Mothership. They had the zero edition character sheets, very cool. Some people can find it a bit ugly, I don't know, but I think it's, really, really nice, but
Sam: I find it, like, ugly, but, like, with purpose. The
Emanoel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I
Sam: serves a purpose.
Emanoel: So there's this, this contributor in the mothership scene. Their name is Quadra, they, they, uh. they did a version of the 0 edition sheet that's bit leaner than the official one. And they managed to put a very, like, a quarter page notes field sheet without taking out information which is like, how did you do that? So, yeah,
Sam: Well, one of my pet peeves with character sheets is absolutely tiny text that's hard to read and certainly part of how they did that was by including even more tiny
Emanoel: yeah, not, not just that the font size is smaller, but also everything shorter, like the height of every skill, it's much more condensed, but still, I think that if you print it out, it looks just fine.
Sam: Yes.
Emanoel: they did some things about it. One of the things was the part where the character is described with name, title, XP, level. So, they amplified that. It takes a better part of the upper side of the character sheet,
Sam: They made it look almost like a driver's license, or like a form of ID, which is just like a nice little touch.
Emanoel: Yeah excellent there's a portrait space so you can just draw your character in there. i love that because when i'm bored i just start doodling.
Sam: Yeah.
Emanoel: Also I think there's more round corners than the other one. And, I think that, inspired by that, the new first edition character sheet has some of these changes. But of course, some of the game changes as well. So, they just adapted, it's not just copy and paste, but also you can see some influence in there.
Sam: Mhm.
Emanoel: And much less black, of course, now the skills don't have that the borders, the things all much clearer.
And one of the things that jumped on me when I saw the character sheet for the first edition the first time, was that all of the arrows, the flowchart part of the sheet, it goes from the top to bottom, from left to right.
And the previous one it's just like, they are everywhere, they are going, it's chaos, you can see some of the lines needed to be grayed out because it would be just lines everywhere on the 0 edition. And the 1st edition it's just much more linear flowchart.
Like the only time you can see the arrows going back to the, from right to left is just when the character sheet just ends on your loadout and your credits, just, just on that, but you don't, you don't even have to worry about that because it just completes the box where you just write your stuff, so it doesn't look like it's pointing you to, to something, it just looks like it's framing the space you are going to writea on.
Sam: It turns negative space into a box in a cool way, yeah.
There's a couple other differences between the Quadra sheet and the 1e sheet that I think are interesting.
The first is that the Quadra sheet starts with you picking your class, whereas both of the official sheets have you start by rolling your stats. I find that really interesting. There's sort of a differing in philosophy of which one of these steps you should actually do first when making your character. Like, the official mothership position is you should roll your stats and then to, like, get a random person, like, born fresh into the world, and then what kind of job do you think that person would have, like, make that choice.
Whereas the quadro philosophy seems to be more on the line of like, okay, what kind of person do you want to be? Like, pick your class, and then roll some stat I mean, like, good luck. Hopefully you roll intellect if you want to be a smart person, right?
But like, still, like, making that choice a reactive one or a proactive one is an interesting difference to me, and it's interesting to me that you can see that play philosophy reflected in the visual design of the character sheet. That's just really cool.
Emanoel: Yeah, that, doesn't happen very often because the character sheets for most of the games are just these modules of stuff you fill in. So you can choose whichever order you want to fill in. But here we have essentially this flowchart. And Quadra had to make a decision that adapted to their playstyle, to their group playstyle.
And, it's funny that you mention that, the official Mothership crew just really wanted to make it that way, which is very tied in with the philosophy for OSR and post OSR adjacent games, that you just roll to see which kind of person you are playing with. And just the older editions of Dungeons and Dragons where you roll stats and then you find out if you are going to be a wizard or a thief or etc.
Sam: Yeah, yeah
The next detail I really love that Quadra added, and I don't know how intentional this is, but the, the health box is this box with rounded corners with like a slash through the middle, and it looks like a pill to me. It's kind of subtle, but it's like a, a nice detail,
Like, you know, sometimes you'll see... I was I was playing Himbos of Myth and Mettle a couple of weeks ago and your stats in that game are, like, lips, and breast, and thighs, and, like, there's a picture of a boob that you write your number in for breast, right, and there's a picture of a pair of lips, and, like, cool, like, I, I'm all for, like, the, that kind of ornateness, and we'll get to some of that in a minute, I think, here.
But the, the subtleness of this, I really appreciate, that it, still looks like a form, but it's, just enough like a pill to be like, oh yeah, that's where your health is.
Emanoel: Yeah, because right below it you have stress and it's just a vertical bar. That very clever.
Sam: And they, kept that then in the 1e character sheet which I thought was very nice. For stress though, but you know, take it.
And then the other thing I really like about the difference between the 0e sheet and the 1e official sheet is, like, It just looks like... a corporate rebrand, almost. Like, seeing them side by side makes it feel like whatever corporation you are filling out this form for did a facelift for the decade. And we're like 10 years in the future now, and everything has rounded edges, and it looks a little bit nicer, and like, it's just like polished up a bit, but it's still the same kind of technical manual.
And I feel like that there's almost like a, a world building feel like across all of Mothership when they put this out. It's like, oh, everything's a little bit in the future. Like, we've moved the whole collective timeline forward a little bit with the release of this sheet. I find that very cool.
Emanoel: Yeah, very cool, very cool. They just the original one has the Mothership logo complete, like the full title, all in the Mothership font, but the new one is just the M, like the brand is like to the rebrand and they just, now we will just M.
Sam: Yeah.
Emanoel: That's really nice.
Sam: Yeah.
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Alright, so, maybe we can still use Mothership as an example here, but I want to move out to like, an old maxim that I heard about character sheets is, whatever takes up space on your character sheet, that's what your game is about.
That, if your character sheet is half about combat, then your game is half about combat. I don't know how much I totally believe this, but there is something to the idea of looking at a character sheet is a survey of what a game is about, because if the thing wasn't important, it wouldn't make it to the character sheet, right?
So what do you think of that, maxim? Is that true? Like, is, how do you think about what a game is about when you're looking at its character sheet?
Emanoel: Yeah. Most of the time I'm just looking to the character sheet and trying to convey what kind of game it is, what kind of system it runs.
Sam: hmm.
Emanoel: I've heard some people saying that when they wanna know what the game is about, the first thing they do is to look to the character sheet Because it just shows vital information about what this game is going to ask from you.
Sam: Yeah. What do you think makes a good character sheet? I mean, I think we both like the Mothership character sheet, and we've talked about details there, but like more broadly speaking, what are you hoping to see from a game's character sheet?
Emanoel: First thing is, I need to know what is my character doing in that game? Particularly, the character sheet must show me what I can add to the crew.
Sam: Hmm.
Emanoel: So, one of the things that I like about the playbooks on PBTA or Forged in the Dark games is that most of the time you have just this huge title with your playbook name, which it would be something like the class from other games.
So this is the first thing, like, this is my role here, this is my function, I'm going to be that guy. I'm going to be the hound. I'm going to be the driver. So this is, to me, is, is one of the most important things that I can always remember what I'm doing there, just so I don't step a line and, and start doing something that my, my other crew member would be doing, like, stealing the spotlight. I don't want to do that.
So it's really cool to see when you can just glance at the card sheet and see what is your card about.
Sam: I really like that too on like a game level, like not just on your character, but when you can look at a character sheet and sort of get a sense for what are we as a party supposed to be doing in this game? Like what, what is the, is this a comedy game or is this a horror game? Like I kind of want to get that vibe from a character sheet also.
I think, you know, we talked about the ways the Mothership character sheet does that by kind of looking like a in world, like, well designed, bureaucratic form of some kind. Also, I feel like most games either go really hard into I just need to get you all the information in the order that you need it, and like, I'm just a reference document here, and they don't really look like anything. Even if they're clean character sheets.
Like I think of the, the trophy gold character sheet as a really good example of this, where it's, it's really clean, it's well put together, I really like this character sheet, but I don't get fantasy dungeon crawler from this sheet. It's just sort of like a nice piece of paper.
And meanwhile, there are some sheets that are, like, extraordinarily ornate. It's like, you print out the sheet, and it's this beautiful piece of art, but I can't fucking find anything on it, because it's, like, too ornate and too beautiful. And, like, that's I get understand what the game is when I'm looking at that, but I I can't then use the object as a utilitarian tool, and I think it's really hard to get both of those things at once.
Emanoel: It's super hard like, you can get the super ornate shit, you can get the vibe 100%, this game is like, I'm going to be this feral warrior, tearing down my enemies with the powers of ancient demons, but also what's my attack bonus? Where do I find it?
Sam: Yeah,
Emanoel: I, I don't know. It's very hard to balance this kind of thing. Some sheets manage to do that at one level or another, but I think the, the, thing we can, we can ask is does the game need you to be all the time, aware of everything in your character sheet? As I said before, some games just ask you to not look to your character sheet until the last minute, until you have to make a save, and then you just steer away from it again So, some games may benefit from Like, being more vibes than
Sam: Yeah.
Emanoel: record of your character. But I don't know, it's hard to balance, it's also very hard to not think of Bruno Prozaiko's character sheets, when you talk about that.
Sam: Yeah, take a look at a couple of these in particular.
Emanoel: So,
MiniBX is a post OSR game by Lucas Rolim, who is also Brazilian, and he asked Bruno to make this character sheet. It's just like this skull with the helmet, but it's just the most ornate helmet you can think of. Covered in eyes and spikes and also there is an, I think it's an eagle or something like that on its top. And it's just facing sideways, and you can see that most of the helmet is just spaces that you can fill in your equipment and notes and spells, and the parts where, the details would be, it's the spaces for you to put your bonuses.
Sam: Yeah.
Emanoel: And I think the most confusing part is that, by the way, I love these character sheets, I love what Bruno did here like you said, you can just hang this on your wall and just admire it as pieces of art.
But most difficult, if you don't know the system especially, is the part where it should be on the cheeks of skull and just hit dice chain. It's just like the simple step dice thing but smaller versions of it on the side until you are dead.
So I know how to play the system but I wouldn't know like right away how to fill it in. And to track that just look into the, at the character sheet.
Sam: Yeah, and we, we have a bunch of these pulled up here, and we're gonna keep going here, but in retrospect, maybe this one was the wrong one, because like, the longer I look at this, like, the more I know what to do with it. Like, when I first looked at it, I was like this is obviously gorgeous art, but like, what the what the heck am I looking? Where is anything on the? It's just hard for my brain to like, process where things are.
I think that's even more true of like the Fallen character sheet, which we have down here below it. It looks like it is a little bit more of a complicated game, not even necessarily a complicated game, but it has more moving parts to it, and so it has the same sort of ornate beautiful style to it, but it has so many things you have to fit on the sheet that my brain is just completely overwhelmed looking at it
Emanoel: Yeah, there's this part where the lady, the main character of this piece, she has this bracer, where you can track armor, and you have two, small circles where you should be, I don't know, marking it to use armor. I don't know. Or maybe it's just like part of the drawing part of the the art.
Sam: Who knows,
Emanoel: Who knows
Sam: like, I don't know, like, I can't emphasize enough how gorgeous these sheets are but, also look at this sheet for Inevitable, which it's dominated by this picture of a hand holding a revolver that just splits the sheet down the middle. And towards the top there's like a piece of paper, like, wrapping around the barrel of the gun with some, like, text on it.
We sing great tales of Blank, who defended myth even when its doom was Inevitable.
And it's like setting up the whole premise of the game, it looks gorgeous, and then there's just only like, four places to write stuff on the sheet. You've got abilities and equipment. And then I guess there's like, Arrival and Contacts, but like, all that stuff is pretty clear at the bottom.
So it's this big, distracting piece of art, but then, you just don't have to put very much on the sheet, so it's totally fine that there's this giant centerpiece, like, drawing so much attention, because I'm not looking for 18 different pieces of information.
Emanoel: Yeah, I think the conclusion here is that the simpler the game, the more you can add some, gorgeous art and some intricate pieces of art.
One of the things that I looked through a lot in the past was like just homebrew versions of D& D or other OSR, very D& D related games. And some of those were made by professional illustrators. And you can see like they use this calligraphy brushes or just even when working digitally they just put in so many details on the borders of the character sheets or just made everything like An object, like, when you track your gold, it's just a purse with gold coins splitting it out.
Sam: Yeah,
Emanoel: And, yeah, because those games have very simple mechanics, not much moving parts, as I said, it's much easier to just cover the shit with art and just let the simplicity of the game guides you through the information you need to find.
And those more complicated games, or more newer games with newer mechanics and more moving parts. They just need a little bit more of focus from the player.
Sam: So yeah, you on that note, designed this game Space Train Space Heist a while back and I'm pretty proud of the game. The character sheets I think don't look particularly good. I'm not happy with the layout of it.
But a thing that I thought while putting that game together that I've said a lot of times since is I want my character sheets, especially for one shot games, to look like a Divekick controller.
Divekick was this video game that came out, it was like a Street Fighter game that came out, where you only have two buttons, Dive and Kick. You can jump, or you can kick. So they like, put out an official controller for it that's just like, the size of an enormous keyboard, and it has two big buttons on it, dive and kick, and you can hit dive, or you can hit kick, or you can hit both at the same time and do your special dive kick ability.
And, I feel like obviously not every game wants to be that simple. Some games want to be longer, some games want to be campaign length games. But especially for one shot games, I think people really overestimate
how much you can accomplish in like a 2-4 hour long play period, that like, you're only gonna get 2 or 3 moments of like being special, for your character. And so you only need dive and kick and dive kick. That's three things. That's three different things you can do, each one of them once, and like, I just want two enormous cool things that I can do on my sheet.
And I, I I feel like I would love to see that simplicity applied to more character sheets, even for complicated games. Just finding ways to limit how much I have to hold in my head or like, actually look at in front of me at any given time, is something I wish we saw more from character sheets.
Emanoel: Yeah, yeah me too when I was designing the first version of CBR+PNK, one of the things that I did was I open up notepad on, on my computer and just try to make a character in noted without any tables, without, even the, the, when you just put an hyphens or asterisks just to split up the information, even that I wasn't using even that so. I tried to make it simple.
Like, there was a time where you just didn't have printers at home, like, not everyone had one, so, not always you were just carrying the blank character sheet, original character sheet, or the character sheet from the book, you didn't have that with you always.
So you had just to take a notepad and start writing your character. You weren't just filling a character sheet, you were writing your character. And just the important parts that you were going to use right off the bat, right when you start the adventure. And then, as the time progresses, you just keep adding because otherwise it would be like, like one hour just scribing on your notebook.
So, wanted to try to make something like that. Just, can I just write these characters with the least number of characters possible? then start to build up the character sheet from that.
Sam: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about where you went from there with uh, CBR+PNK? Because the final form factor of a dry erase writable, pamphlet character sheet is so cool. Like, I want every game to have, like, a dry erase character sheet, it's so good, I, so how did you get there from a notepad, trying your best to be minimal?
Emanoel: Well, one of my main inspirations was the Mothership Zero Edition sheet because of the flowchart thing, I think it matches really well with the theme of sci fi and cyberpunk.
And also, one of the important things about the game was that your characters were disposable. They were just there for their last run, So yeah. If they succeed, great, if they didn't, another one would take their place.
Later on when we start making the augmented edition with Mythworks, this came up about, well, we are going to put in four character sheets in this box, and they would be like this brochure quality as well.
Sam: huh.
Emanoel: But then you just use that one time and just throw it away. Well, that fits in the theme of the game, but doesn't feel nice, right? You're just throwing it away.
So, I don't recall exactly who suggested, but this was a thing that we had to pursue and took some months to figure out with our manufacturer. But also worked really well because we are just fiddling with dry erasers, and when you are done, that one shot, and you just erase it, and the character is no more. You can't even keep it. At most you can take a picture of it, but your character is gone, like, if he succeeded or not, your character is gone.
So yeah, it's really cool that you managed to achieve that with your manufacturer. And, think I'm going to try to apply it to more, more games if
Sam: Yeah. I'm certainly gonna adopt it if I ever get to print something for real, cause it's, it's exactly what I want.
Emanoel: Yeah, and by the way, it's not very technical, we just figured it out that if you cover it with UV coat,
Sam: Oh
Emanoel: it just works like that. It just works with the dry reason marker.
Sam: Well listen, everyone listening to this, go make your dry erase character sheets now. Please, you know how to do it, it's, you have no excuse.
One last sort of Interesting way of doing character sheets that I wanted to shout out was I played Quest this year for the first time, which is it's a simplified down, D&D like game.
And, the character sheet for it is really simple, it's basically a mad lib, like, just a form fillable, like, Hello, my name is blank, I'm blank years old, and stand blank tall. You fill out a card like that. You have, like, hit points, and action points, which are, like, metacurrency in the game.
And then all of your special abilities that, like, make your character a cleric, or make your character a ranger, or whatever, come on individual playing cards. And they sell those in a pack, like, good on them for having figured out how to, like sell you a larger pack of cards to play the game with.
But then, it's way easier to, like, keep track of a bunch of special abilities I've found when they're all on one card each as opposed to, like, somehow crammed onto a single piece of paper. That, like, having a hand of cards makes it much clearer, like, what are your spellcasting options at any given moment, as opposed to having to like, turn your paper over, and like, look stuff up in a book, or like, doing the, the PBTA sheet thing we were talking about before, of like, cram every move in there, but then which ones do you have, and which ones you don't.
I don't know if there's like, another way to sort of take complicated information and export it from your sheet to some other kind of reference document, but cards were just so wonderful for that, and it, it was really cool to see.
Emanoel: Yeah, one of the things I like about that, it gets that bridge between TTRPGs and board games. Yeah. And board games are much more approachable for people who never play it, also people who don't play very often.
So it's much easier for you to just pick a bunch of cards then look through them and just you create your space. You just don't have to follow the space created by the designer of the card sheet you can create your space, your play area. Just placing down the cards in the order you want to use them, in the order of importance that you have.
Because, of course, it's a collaborative game, so you don't have to hide the cards from your other players. And, yeah, I love that when the RPG just have some board gamey components and vice versa as well.
Sam: Well, it's interesting that you say that, too, because another effect of the cards is when you're, like, holding a hand of cards, you see those cards as your options. Like, you stop thinking about, okay, what else could I be doing? And you look to, like, which of these five cards do I want to use next?
And, you might not be, like, strictly limited to, I mean, like, you can obviously still do whatever you want. Like, if you're talking to a giant, you don't have to use the, like, charm person on the giant. You can just sort of try to be a charming person and like talk with them still.
But because you're holding that charm person card in your hand and a Fireball card in the other hand, you're like these are the two things I can do and you a little bit narrow your focus of what you're thinking about when you're holding them.
Emanoel: Yeah, in some cases that can just help to reinforce the role you are playing, the role you are playing in the party but for me it would be like just an easier way to manage my options.
So I'm playing Pathfinder second edition for about five months now. And we are, playing on roll 20 and I know it's much easier to play it on Roll20, but it's just, to me, it's just so hard to keep track of everything, and I'm playing a cleric, so a magic user, and you have all these spells, and every day you can prepare from that spell list that's just enormous.
Sam: Yeah,
Emanoel: And then, doing that, I was like, yeah, that's why they have those spell card decks because it's much easier to go through the cards and have the descriptions on the back and just select the ones you are going to use that day, etc.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I have like 30 more topics on character sheets that I could bring up but I, I also do have to jump here in a minute. So is, is there anything, kind of, conclusions you want to say about character sheets or about the mothership sheet especially?
Emanoel: conclusions! I'm not a man of conclusions, Sam. I'm
Sam: That's fine, we can just cut it right here. Fuck it, see y'all later.
Sam: Thanks again to Emanuel for being here.
As I mentioned at the top, you can find pictures of all the sheets we talked about and more along with additional thoughts and commentary from me on a blog post on the Dice Exploder blog. Link in the show notes.
You can find Emanuel on socials at Emanuel Melo or Cabinet of Curiosities or both on some platforms. He's got a website. You can buy CBR+PNK now from MythWorks. There's all kinds of links in the show notes. Check it out.
As always, you can find me on socials at s. dunnewold or on the Dice Exploder Discord. Our logo was designed by sporgory, our theme song is Sunset Bridge by PurelyGrey, and our ad music is Lilypads by my boy Travis Tesmer.
And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.